Waste Management and Recycling

Every year, the world generates more waste than it can manage. Cities are at the center of this challenge, urban areas generate over 70% of global waste, and how a city collects, sorts, and processes its waste shapes the quality of life of every resident. Landfills overflow, oceans fill with plastic, and valuable materials are buried instead of recovered. The challenge is not only environmental — it is also a massive missed economic opportunity

Waste management is one of the most visible and immediate challenges of urban life. As cities grow faster than ever — driven by migration, population growth, and economic development — the systems built to handle waste are struggling to keep pace. Collection routes, sorting facilities, and treatment plants were designed for smaller, slower-growing cities, and rapid urbanization is outrunning them. Beyond infrastructure, the challenge is also behavioral: effective waste management depends on millions of residents sorting, reducing, and disposing of waste correctly — habits that require sustained public education and community buy-in that many cities have not yet achieved. In lower-income cities, the gap is most acute: basic collection infrastructure is absent in entire neighborhoods, and residents who depend on collecting and selling recyclable materials for their livelihood fill the void — doing work that is essential to the city's waste system but receiving no formal recognition, protection, or support. In wealthier cities, the problem shifts: households generate enormous volumes of electronics, furniture, and appliances that are still functional but discarded anyway, with almost no municipal systems for reuse or redistribution.
Recycling markets add another layer of fragility — they depend on commodity prices that fluctuate wildly, making what works economically one year unviable the next. And even where systems exist, product design and corporate incentives often work against recovery and reuse.

Each waste stream presents different challenges and affects different populations. Pick the one your team wants to dig into, then take it to your worksheet.